1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for obtaining cooked meat, for example, Doner meat, within the speed, hygenic conditions, form and standards required by a fast food system and an integrated meat broiling and cutting instrument for achieving this method.
2. Description of the Related Art
The field of the invention and the manual technique for making Turkish Doner Kebab is known. In the conventional method a grill bar, usually vertical, dressed with Doner material of meat and minced meat, is rotated on its vertical axis in front of a cooker and the broiled parts of the meat is manually cut by a human operator using a knife in a vertically downward fashion.
According to said method, rotation of the meat cylinders arranged around the grill bar in the said order were tried in different ways, namely, vertically and horizontally, different types of cookers were tried, electrical knives were used for cutting but no alternative solution or modification could be provided for the traditional way of rotating the meat on the grill axis in front of a cooker and cutting the broiled parts by a human operated knife. The most improved variation of the traditional method comprises the preparation and freezing of the blocks of meat at a central place and transmitting the frozen meat blocks to the cooking station, and using electrical knives in cutting the broiled meat. Presently, there is no method or instrument, known or used, both for broiling and cutting Doner meat in the same amount and form, ready to serve, without human intervention.
Publications representing the State-of-the-Art are the British Patent No 2,218,327xe2x80x94MICHAEL ZANNETOS, British Patent No 2,271,274xe2x80x94MUSTAFA KAYA TUREDI, European Patent Application No 85300967,8xe2x80x94OZORAN LIMITED, and as it is known from all of these documents, the Doner meat to be cooked is aligned in a row around a single grill bar and a single bar of meat is rotated in front of a single cooker. The cooked meat is cut off by a human operated knife or various other cutting tools, thus made ready to serve. Neither of the above publications comprises the act of putting ready-to-cook meat into boxes and depending on the preferences or needs, placing 5, 6 or 8 meat boxes onto a rotating carrier chassis and rotating all of them together around 4, 5 or 7 separate cookers, thus progressively broiling the meats inside the boxes without human intervention and cutting them into ready-to-service Doner meat of the same standard cooking degree and amount within a predetermined time.
Therefore, as a result of the presently known technique, standard form or standard weight has never been achieved in obtaining cooked and ready-to-serve Doner meat. The process of rotating and cutting could not be automated and they were carried on by a human and/or a human operated knife. The speed of obtaining cooked meat has been limited to the broiling speed of the meat in a single block, and standardization, speed and practicality of a fast food system could not be obtained. The hygienic conditions, left only to the operator, were far from being consistently clean.
The present invention provides the automation and standardization required in a fast-food system as described herein below; all of the parts constituting the integrated broiling and cutting device of the invention are controlled by motors directed from a central control panel and they can be operated in co-operation and as a whole in an automatic way, and the integrated broiling and cutting device could be adjusted to obtain the desired amount of meat at a desired broiling rate. As a result, all of the operations, either in small businesses or big ones could be carried out without direct human intervention and the broiled and cut meat is obtained in a standard form and weight.
The integrated Doner cooking and cutting device of the invention comprises separate units each carrying out a different operation:
1) Meat Containers
2) Broiling unit
3) Rotating Unit
4) Cutting unit
5) Central control and adjustment panel.